The dream of a better world is back

par Alain Gresh,
mai 2009

For two decades, from the sierras of Latin America to the paddy fields of Asia and the mountains of North Africa, a single hurricane seemed to be sweeping away the old colonial order and the economic dominance of the North. As the title of a 1977 documentary by Chris Marker depicting revolutionary struggles from Paris to La Paz put it : “Deep down the air is red” (Le fond de l’air est rouge).

In 1956 Egypt’s President Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company. In the Aures region of eastern Algeria, the fallaghas (armed militants) rose up to put an end to their country’s status as a mere département of France. Following his triumph in Havana, Che Guevara, the hero of the Cuban revolution, went off to fight other anti-imperialist causes from the Congo to Bolivia. In Vietnam, people withstood massive US bombings. And in the distant Dhofar mountains of the Arab peninsula, guerrillas liberated women and tribespeople from age-old oppression in the name of “scientific socialism”.

In Europe and the United States, too, students and workers rose up against the old order under the banner of a new form of socialism. At a meeting in Algiers in 1973, the leaders of non-aligned countries declared that they wanted to create a new international economic order based on regaining control of their natural resources. The petroleum-producing countries led the way by nationalising their strategic asset. The times were indeed a-changin’, as Bob Dylan sang.

Times are a-changin’

Although they were bolstered by Russian aid, these movements were markedly different from the Soviet model : they denounced Moscow’s bureaucratisation of power, its lack of militancy and its acceptance of peaceful coexistence with Washington, which was viewed as tantamount to a defence of the status quo. Yet beyond their diversity, what these movements had in common was their call for revolution. They wanted to overturn the old social order, both nationally and internationally, and by any means, including violence and coup d’état. So-called bourgeois democracies were held in contempt and elections seen as the oppressors’ instrument of domination.

No one summed up the essence of this period better than Jean-Paul Sartre, who in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth [1], wrote that the violence of the colonised is “neither a storm in a tea cup nor the re-emergence of savage instincts nor even the consequence of resentment : it is man reconstructing himself… the colonised are cured of colonial neurosis by driving the colonist out by force”. Sartre adds that “sons of violence at every instant draw their humanity from it ; we were human beings at their expense, they are making themselves human beings at ours. Another man : a man of higher quality.”

But within 20 or 30 years, such language had all but vanished. The smallest hope of changing the social order was equated with a totalitarian impulse and the ideal of equality with the gulag archipelago. Money and individualism were triumphant everywhere. “We were condemned to live in the world we live in,” as historian François Furet put it. We had to put aside rose-tinted dreams.

Those in the North left with a bad conscience about endemic poverty could always sign up with the humanitarian organisations that were ready to tend the victims of catastrophes, wars and dictatorship, just as charitably inclined ladies used to care for the poor, while making sure they didn’t succumb to socialist propaganda. Médecins Sans Frontières replaced international brigades, and charity replaced solidarity. Violence, meanwhile, was now bracketed with terrorism and totally discredited. Only the violence of western states retained its legitimacy.

How did such a revolution (perhaps more accurately a counter-revolution) come about in such a short space of time ? A number of factors played their part. Far from emerging permanently weakened from its defeat in Vietnam, the US staged a remarkable recovery that coincided with the USSR’s spectacular decline, politically, culturally and ideologically. This became all too apparent in the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, drawing a line under hopes for socialism with a human face.

By being active on many fronts, the US managed to impose an economic order spread by global financial institutions ; discredit the socialist model by comparing it to the gulag ; exhaust the Soviet Union with dubious engagement in Afghanistan and the arms race ; and secure the cooperation of new elites which emerged from the anticolonial struggle.

The behaviour of these elites suggests that this counter-revolution was also the product of a disillusionment that was as great as to the messianic expectations of the birth of a “new man” that Sartre had hoped for. It is true that Frantz Fanon among others warned of the risk of the expropriation of the revolution and denounced those who hid their black skin under a white mask. But the reality went beyond his worst nightmares : the elites proclaimed themselves scientific socialists from Ethiopia to Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo allied themselves without compunction with the liberal capitalist order. And everywhere new classes sprang up that were often as rapacious as the old colonists.

In politics, discredited bourgeois democracy gave way to a form of democracy which was popular in name only and whose only “justification” was its pronounced dictatorial character in countries allied to the West, from Indonesia to Zaire. Long drawn-out armed struggles hadn’t simply led to the defeat of the enemy and their allies in the upper echelons of colonial society. It had also contributed to the stifling of all dissident voices : in time of war, criticism equalled betrayal.

In Algeria, for example, the National Liberation Front (FLN) eliminated not only external enemies but also all opposition within its ranks. And such measures continued long after independence. In Latin America, the establishment of brutal military dictatorships in the 1970s showed that “bourgeois democracy” and formal freedoms also had some advantages, something which the people of eastern Europe already suspected.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc and the triumph of liberalism seemed to usher in a new era : the North was omnipotent the world over, and more or less free elections were taking place everywhere from eastern Europe to Africa and South America. The Millennium Goals adopted by the UN in 2000 expressed a heady optimism about poverty reduction, increased access to education and health, and gender equality.

Lessons of the past

In this new context, revolutionary forces had to reassess their language, their strategy and their actions, not least as the mythology of the armed struggle (“Create two, three, many Vietnams,” as Che Guevara put it) also had an abstract Romantic quality. For example, it was only after much deliberation that the Vietnamese workers’ party in Hanoi decided in late 1963 to respond militarily in the south of the country to the US escalation, conscious of the price that their people would have to pay for the decision [2] (see Obama’s Afghanistan ?)

It was an awareness of the lessons of the past that made Nelson Mandela willing to enter into dialogue with the South African government and favour a compromise that guaranteed whites sufficient rights to prevent an exodus like the ones that occurred in Angola, Mozambique and – in very different circumstances – Algeria. Such a compromise also met the demands of the western powers which entirely dominated the world economy in the early 1990s. But compromise comes at a price : the struggle against deep social inequalities, felt especially acutely by blacks, had to take a back seat.

Subcomandante Marcos of Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation criticised the apologia for revolutionary violence which dominated in the 1970s : “We don’t want to impose our solutions by force, we want to create a democratic space. We don’t see armed struggle in the classic sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only all-powerful truth around which everything is organised. In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. We didn’t go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard” [3]. But the Zapatista revolution remained more potential than actual.

Elsewhere, armed struggles from Central America or Northern Ireland came to an end along with the cold war. Even in Palestine, the 1993 Oslo Accords seemed at last to open the way to peace. There remained a few residual conflicts in Sri Lanka or in the Basque country in Spain, but these were unappealing models.

And yet, all the illusions about the end of history, eradicating inequality and poverty, and creating a new world order were to fade away as a result of the failure of neoliberal policies and the US’s military adventurism. The arrival of China and India on the international stage created room for manoeuvre for the countries of the South.

The problem of changing society at home and the international political order was back, even if no longer in the name of “scientific socialism” but as ragbag mix of millenarian hopes, assertions of cultural and political nationalism, and an egalitarianism based on indigenous and religious traditions.

Latin America, which swallowed its liberal medicine for many years, has embarked on this new phase ; movements have come to power that are resolved to change society profoundly and to give bread to the poorest and the excluded, and to start with, the native peoples. And direct confrontation with the powers-that-be is taking place by means of the ballot box. Armed conflict is no longer the order of the day.

In the Middle East it’s less the social order that is being challenged than foreign – principally US – military intervention. Armed struggle, often conducted in the name of Islam, whether by Hizbullah or Hamas, and broadly supported by public opinion, is recording successes. By contrast, al-Qaida, as a transnational network without local roots, owes its very relative popularity to its ability to strike against the US.

In Asia, the challenge to social inequality is combined – often in contradictory ways – with governments’ ability to mobilise popular opinion around the defence of sovereignty, which has long been held in contempt, and a reappraisal of the international order.

The situations may be many and diverse, but it’s the case that the period of relative stability which prevailed from the 1990s till the early part of this decade is coming to an end. It is difficult to know what new shocks may lie ahead. But the dream of a better world, which is as old as humanity itself, is back – even if its shape has changed since the 1960s.

P.-S.

Translated by George Miller

[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre and a foreword by Homi K Bhabha, Grove Press, New York, 2005.